The author of “Purposeful Educator Connections,” Marcela Andrés, explores strategies to deepen relationships with students, stay connected to your educator purpose, and improve classroom culture. She provides 5 Key Principles that empower teachers to build trust, inspire learning, and transform classroom environments.
Find Marcela’s book, “Purposeful Educator Connection” here.
Visit the designEDegagement website here.
Subscribe to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast on iTunes or visit BarkleyPD.com to find new episodes!
Podcast Transcript:
[00:00:00.200] – Steve [Intro]
Hello, and welcome to the Teacher Edition of Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud. Teaching is a complex and rewarding journey, and I’m always eager to explore the many ways teachers engage students in their learning. This podcast is dedicated to supporting you, the teacher, as you inspire and guide your students. Thanks for joining me. I’m excited you’re here.
[00:00:29.950] – Steve
Teachers Building Purposeful Connections. Marcela Andrés, from designEDegagement is joining our podcast. With a rich background in teaching leadership and community engagement, she has dedicated her career to understanding how educators can create deeper connections with students, colleagues, and stakeholders. She works to integrate social-emotional learning and cultural responsiveness into educational practices. Her book, “Purposeful Educator Connections,” details years of experience and research into actionable principles that empower educators to build trust, inspire learning, and transform classroom environments. Welcome, Marcela.
[00:01:18.510] – Marcela
Thank you, Steve, for having me. So excited and grateful to be here with you today.
[00:01:23.670] – Steve
I’m wondering if you might share some of your personal stories that I know built into your book about your experiences as a student and as a teacher that lead to the work you’re doing today.
[00:01:40.550] – Marcela
Yeah, absolutely. Throughout the book, there’s a lot of stories sprinkled about the amazing educators that impacted my life. But the one that came to mind when I think about this question is Ms. Tavassoli. She…my gosh, just thinking about her makes my heart so warm. She is the profile of an amazing educator, of one who purposely connected with me and with students in our school, in our community. What’s coming up for me, especially right now, because it’s the Christmas season and I celebrate Christmas, there was one Christmas that my mother, at the time, was a single and she could not afford gifts. The season was looking rather bleak. Ms. Tavassoli had a really good relationship with my mom, and she obviously caught wind of that through the conversations. She and other teachers took it upon themselves to buy gifts for my sisters and I. The day before Christmas, I heard a door knock, and there was Ms. Tavassoli with two other teachers at my door with bags of gifts. I’m going to try not to cry because you just remember Marcela as a little girl and being in shock that my teacher left her schoolhouse, right?
[00:03:12.870] – Marcela
And that’s the only time I had seen her to come to our apartment with bags of gifts for our family. For me, that was just super powerful and knowing that she and others just really cared about us. And not only did she give us gifts, I think it opened up a relationship between her and I, because after that, I felt like any time she saw me in the hall, she would be like, “how are you doing? How’s your family doing?” As a matter of fact, there was one time that I was really struggling, both with my identity, because at the time, my mom was a single mom, and then also with my weight. She just pulled me outside one day, and she said, You cannot let your circumstances define who you are. You cannot see this right now, but you were made for something so special. She would pour in these little gems into my life all the time. Anyways, she and I still have a relationship to this very day.
[00:04:16.180] – Steve
It doesn’t surprise me.
[00:04:18.420] – Marcela
Yeah. I think that’s the anchor of my work. When I think about teachers, that’s who they are. They have this very special position in the lives of our students, and they have the power to not only educate and share their academic knowledge, but they have the power to say, I see you, I see your circumstances, and you’re not that. You are brilliant, you’re capable. You’re everything that you want to be. And so that’s why.
[00:04:51.860] – Steve
Interesting. I used to use the phrase that teachers had to be the ultimate optimist in that they can see a future that there’s no current data to necessarily support.
[00:05:09.810] – Marcela
I love that. Yeah.
[00:05:13.580] – Steve
It’s easy to see bright futures for kids that look like they have everything going for them. But that teacher can see that future. There’s stuff not around here to point to it. The student can’t see it him or herself, but the teacher sees it and holds on to it.
[00:05:32.740] – Marcela
That is so profound. To have someone, like you said, a teacher, to be able to not judge, not criticize, but to uplift and see beyond the data points is incredible. That’s a special person.
[00:05:51.020] – Steve
How do you think those teachers influenced your teaching when you stepped into the classroom?
[00:06:01.090] – Marcela
Yeah. I definitely am not a teacher by trainings. Life brought me into education. My background is in corporate, and then I became a teacher because I moved to Mexico, and they I started as a tutor, and then they lost their fifth-grade teacher, and I became the fifth-grade teacher. Then they were like, “oh, you did fine. And so let’s go to corporate teacher.” I was like, okay. But although I didn’t have formal training, I was certainly pulling from the knowledge that I had as a student and then also from my corporate experience to put together the way I would teach. In hindsight, I’m really transparent in the book about the the misses that I had, meaning that because I wasn’t equipped, because I didn’t know the craft, and I didn’t develop the craft at the time, I could see how my special position in life of children could have had an impact on them. In the book, I specifically say, I hope teachers after me were able to wrinkle out some of the things that I caused, and specifically, that connection piece, I think, was what I mentioned in the book.
[00:07:16.510] – Steve
So in the book, “Purposeful Educator Connections,” you outlined five key principles for strengthening relationships with students. And I’m wondering if I just read them off one at a time you could take each one and expand on it a little bit for us.
[00:07:34.350] – Marcela
Absolutely.
[00:07:35.350] – Steve
The first one is, know your why.
[00:07:40.720] – Marcela
Yeah. I love Michael Jr., the comedian, and I think in his video, if you go online to know your why, it’s the perfect video, four-minute video that explains the difference when you operate from your why. And there’s also other books that uplift that. But I think that When I think back to Ms. Tavassoli, she was operating from her why. She deeply knew that education meant liberation. She deeply knew that because of her own life experience, she wanted to share knowledge and share tools with students. She wasn’t in the schoolhouse as an educator just to impart knowledge. She was there to do that, and she was also there to help students like myself and others feel seen despite their circumstances. So I think that this principle of knowing your why is very, very important, especially in a time where we have teachers leaving the field, you have to be anchored to a purpose, I think, to show up in your most authentic and most dedicated way, especially when the days get really hard, which I know they have been lately.
[00:08:58.440] – Steve
Next concept is understand context beyond compliance.
[00:09:05.300] – Marcela
Yeah. Context is everything. We put labels on children. We put labels on systems, on things that are within the schoolhouse. And it’s really important as educators to understand the context and go beyond that compliance piece of it. In our country, we have what we call Title I schools, meaning that they receive extra funding because they’re students who are at risk. And what that means is at risk for failure. But it’s really important that educators take time and administrators take time to know who are the students that are inside of their schoolhouse, and don’t let those compulsory things, driven by federal policies and compliance, dictate their understanding of that student’s ability. It’s really critical for them to understand, I have this student in my classroom. They love to read, they love to play, they love to dance. They are from Guatemala, and here’s how I can connect with them, because that’s going to be the way that they connect with the student versus, okay, that student’s family is low socioeconomic status, and they are at risk. All the other labels, right? There’s a different way that educators can approach it for sure if they understand their context beyond compliance.
[00:10:43.790] – Steve
Next one is, foster meaningful interactions.
[00:10:48.300] – Marcela
Yes. I know in a world where we’re like an instant gratification, moving 100 miles an hour, using AI, meaningful interactions are critical. We, I think, need to just take time to slow down and share stories, have fun, and connect, really take time to connect with students inside the schoolhouse. And that’s beyond just the knowledge and the scope and sequence that’s being shared with them.
[00:11:26.040] – Steve
I had the magic word in my mind when I read that one to you and you came back and said, it’s time.
[00:11:34.760] – Marcela
Exactly. Yeah. I know that we’re limited with time, but there’s always a way to give kids a high five. There’s always a way to curate this space where you can connect with them within the time constraints that you definitely have.
[00:11:53.320] – Steve
I use the phrase, “make time” versus “find time.”
[00:11:58.660] – Marcela
Yeah. I love that.
[00:11:59.280] – Steve
When I find the time, it’s not growing. The 24 hours are there. It’s a pretty fixed commodity. So it’s really about, do you decide that you make time for that. I love – my niece years ago, the first thing her middle school did was to go on a three-day overnight camping trip. Those were the three days of the school year.
[00:12:31.540] – Marcela
I love that.
[00:12:33.320] – Steve
Yeah. That’s brilliant.
[00:12:38.590] – Marcela
We haven’t passed out any books.
[00:12:41.490] – Steve
We haven’t given directions. We haven’t gone over a syllabus. No, we got three days right up front. We’re going to get to know each other as a group, work together as a group. And now we’ll come back and jump into this. The teacher that sets that time in the hall to be greeting kids on their way in that puts together the morning meeting. Those are all things that say, I make time to have those interactions. I’m always looking for the opportunities when they pop up, but to consciously say it’s built into the schedule. One other one that you just triggered for me, I read years ago, I loved it. It’s mindset. I was reading about a principal who had his schedule laying out on his desk every morning, where other principals would have written down bus duty. This principal had written down interact with students during eight minutes of being outside. So it was bus duty.
[00:13:49.610] – Marcela
Yeah. It’s the framing, the asset-based…
[00:13:52.780] – Steve
He wasn’t going out there to spend bus duty. He was going out there to have that eight minutes with kids where he wasn’t be answering a phone or doing anything else, he could focus that time in.
[00:14:05.620] – Marcela
Yes. I hope people are taking some copious notes because those were two really good strategy to definitely build some meaningful interactions for sure. Thanks for sharing.
[00:14:16.880] – Steve
The next one you have… It’s funny that you say that because it goes back to myself. If I looked at elementary school, teachers who went out on the playground and played with us left an impact.
[00:14:30.570] – Marcela
Absolutely.
[00:14:31.310] – Steve
And you know how teachers need that time for themselves. So I totally get it. But the teachers who did that, our interpretation of it was that we were important. And I guess we saw them differently.
[00:14:47.750] – Marcela
Yeah. And you probably treat them differently when you got back into the classroom. They were able to have better classroom management because there was a stronger relationship.
[00:14:57.600] – Steve
Relationship. Yeah. Next one you have is design high-quality learning environments.
[00:15:02.470] – Marcela
Yes, I love this one. I think that learning is so fun. I’m a lifelong learner, and I just appreciate, and I think it’s really important for educators to curate spaces of joyful learning and think about how can they make the knowledge that they’re trying to impart stick. You can still see today in classrooms, in colleges, and universities, that we have this, what Pablo Freire calls “thinking model” of just pouring in knowledge, just opening somebody’s brain and like, Here’s the knowledge. But really, when you take the opportunity to create an experience of teaching something, it sticks with a child much more. I didn’t mention this one in my book, but we were reading a book of how to make soup with rocks. We read that book, and then we made the soup with rocks. I still remember that experience and that book, probably to a T, right? We went outside to our little forest in that elementary. It was so fun. It made me look forward to school every single day because I was like, well, what else is Ms. Jones going to do? So high-quality learning environments just ignite a different level of learning. And I think it’s really important for us to be thoughtful and intentional about how we create those.
[00:16:27.400] – Steve
You have me laughing because I read that book with my kids when I taught first grade. It’s a fun book.
[00:16:34.450] – Marcela
It’s such a fun book. If you’re just reading it, okay, it’s a fun book in itself. But imagine taking your kids out there to find those rocks and then come back and make a stew and then just enjoying it. Yeah.
[00:16:46.460] – Steve
Yeah. Very cool. And the last one you have is partner with key stakeholders.
[00:16:52.590] – Marcela
Yes. That one’s just so critical. Students have families, and you’re not alone as an educator helping develop this next generation of leaders. And although you hold a very special position in the life of a child and a student, there are other people there that are also their champions. And it’s important to find the ways to meaningfully partner with them so that you can work in coordinated ways so that children can thrive. And I think back to what I mentioned earlier, I believe, was the fact that we don’t teach this. I didn’t mention this earlier. We don’t teach teachers in pre-service or in-service how to do that and do that well. But it’s really important that administrators and school systems think about how we train teachers to do that, because it’s also a game changer once the student leaves the schoolhouse.
[00:17:56.930] – Steve
Before we wrap up, I’m wondering if you’ve got an example of a question or two that teachers might ask themselves to guide their reflection on their current level of authentic relationships. Questions that might lead teachers to think about what a next step that I might want to take would be?
[00:18:24.930] – Marcela
I end the book with this, and I think it’s an important thing, especially if COVID taught us anything, it taught us, I think, how to really slow down and understand that anything can happen in any moment. It happened to all of us across the board. I think the first question that they have to think about is, how am I doing personally as an educator? Take time to check in with themselves and just really check in with themselves. Like I said earlier, we have a lot of teachers who are burnt out who are not developing or not taking the time to develop that relationships with themselves. What do they find joy in? What brings them happiness? What fills their cup so that they can abundantly overflow and not pour to others. I would say that’s the first question. How are you? Then after you have some time to reflect on that, I would say that the next question that they could consider asking themselves is, All right, in my classroom, how am I showing up as my my most authentic version to also give permission for students to show up in their most authentic version. And once they reckon with that question, then the next question I would say is, what can I do to go to the next level?
[00:19:56.830] – Marcela
Wherever they’re at, the next question would be, what can I do to go to the next level? And I think the last thing is not so much as a question, more so than an acknowledgement. It’s okay to be wherever you are. The first day is the first day. The first step is the first step. Take steps to move forward and give yourself grace, regardless of where you’re at in the journey.
[00:20:21.330] – Steve
Grace is an important one. Well, thank you so much. What’s the way that teachers might be able to check in and find out more about the work you’re doing, find out about your book?
[00:20:33.900] – Marcela
Yeah, definitely. My book is sold on, I believe, all platforms, definitely through my publisher, Rutledge. But Amazon, Bards and Noble, you can Google it, you’ll find it. And if they want to connect with me, they could also go on to my website, marcelandres.com, or any of the social media. I’m on all the platforms, and so I’m very searchable and would love to connect with teachers. I would love to hear their feedback on the book because I got to tell you, I poured my little heart in there, and I was vulnerable. I was very authentic, and it brings me joy when I see the feedback that I get from educators.
[00:21:14.860] – Steve
We’ll put the link to your book and to your website into the podcast lead-in and make it easier for folks to find. Thank you so much, and just best wishes on the very important work that you’re doing.
[00:21:27.480] – Marcela
Thank you, Steve, and thank you so much for the opportunity. I really enjoyed chatting with you and look forward to a growing relationship.
[00:21:35.070] – Steve
That’d be great.
[00:21:37.560] – Steve [Outro]
Thanks for listening, folks. I’d love to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn at Steve Barkley, or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.
